Builders' Forum Archives

differences in handling

Posted by LeeG on Mar 26, 2005

no kidding. You bring up a worthwhile point about how boats vary with weight in them. For catalog shoppers it's awfully easy to draw inferences from numbers indicating carrying capacity but what happens on the water is another story. You could take two kayaks with the same published hull volumes but they could handle totally different in their ranges of loading. I've got a Mariner Express that is a pretty high volume kayak for it's length. I've taken it camping a few times and even though it's got a lot of air to fill it's really not that happy in the water with too much weight compared to some other boats that appear to have the same volume. It's volume is meant for dynamic action in the water,,kind of the opposite from low volume greenland boats. On a barely related tangent, something folks should do is play around with a flooded kayak in flat water. Partially flood the cockpit or compartments and paddle it around. Besides being an eye opener on how important hatches are it's a tiny,tiny clue how important staying in the kayak is for rough water. Whenever folks learn rescues in flat water they've only BEGUN to understand what happens in waves. You can't just stop with becoming proficient with rescues in flat water if you actually go paddling where there's wind/waves, cuz that's where you'll actually dump it.